Agile and stable organizations

Stability and agility: managing challenges with flexible and adjustable organizations

Public administration must not just accomplish today’s tasks but has to be prepared for the challenges ahead. Public authorities must be enabled to identify and quickly react to potential risks while ensuring the necessary stability to maintain an environment that nurtures beneficial and transparent decisions and results.

BearingPoint advises implementing agile and stabile organizations and processes! An “Agile Public Service” is the new paradigm of a modern, future-oriented and strategic-acting public administrative organization.

Agility in public administration is defined by establishing management tools and organizational concepts that provide the optimal balance of flexibility and stability. This balance provides a stabile framework for the continuous and standardized use of tools that empower change and flexibility. To handle such change, governments need expert help. More than three hundred of our consultants are specifically dedicated to government and public service activities. We have developed tailored offers to help European, national and local administrative bodies carry out their transformation and modernization processes. Our government team is supported at the European level by a knowledge management system covering all our solutions: business strategy and transformation, change management, client relation management, financial services, supply chains, human resources and information technology.

BearingPoint identifies and pursues five levers the help public administrations achieve agility:

1. Strategic governance and resource management:

Setting explicit objectives enables the public as well as politicians to validate the effective and efficient usage of funds and resources. BearingPoint’s approach and methods enhance the agility of the public service significantly by aligning strategic governance and resource management by reducing complexity, promoting transparency, improving communication, developing competencies, increasing flexibility and motivating.

2. Flexible and adaptive organizational structure:

Organizational structures of public administrations have to be sufficiently flexible and adaptive to changing conditions. The organizational structure has to be able to react adequately and quickly to challenges due to intended changes from inside as well as non-intended changes from outside the organization. Independent organizational units have to be established to conceive and evaluate these changes as well as internalize, implement and act on behalf of them. These units have to be provided with the necessary set of standardized transformation tools to continuously realign the organization with the current tasks and challenges. As an experienced advisor, BearingPoint supports public administrations in establishing expertise and implementing proven tools in areas such as business process management and quality management.

3. Strategic human resource management:

Strategic human resource management enhances the agility of public administrations by defining and implementing measures, continuously developing the capabilities of employees as well as optimizing the allocation of the entire workforce. BearingPoint delivers strategic workforce planning, enabling the public sector to transform its HR function according to key developments. BearingPoint supports in building strategic human resource management and new human resources information systems (HRIS), applying standardized, comparable and proven methods.

4. Customer- (stakeholder-) oriented IT:

Customer expectations of their interaction and relationship with public administrations are changing as new channels and methods emerge through digital technologies. Information technology departments are increasingly pressurized to be more costumer orientated, to do it faster at a lower cost while adhering to quality standards and regulations. BearingPoint helps to define customer channel strategies. Our goal is to fully extend and improve IT capability and to align this effectively with the strategy of the public service to be delivered.

5. Organizational culture and the ability to change:

The dynamic and essential feature of agility is the ability to steadily face change. A prerequisite is a cultural environment that emphasizes the opportunities of change rather than the risks. The BearingPoint Change Management method pursues a holistic and lasting approach. This approach has been implemented and continuously enriched by best-practice methods and instruments in many national and international projects.

The favored effects of an agile administration are only possible when all the different levers collaborate. Every organization of public administration must define their own degree of agility, the proportion of flexibility and stability. The ratio is set according to established goals and priorities and then transferred to a pre-defined transformation program to increase agility step-wise within the organization until the desired level is achieved.